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Episode Date: July 23, 2026

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Live from NPR news, I'm Jail Snyder. President Trump is threatening to bomb one power plant to her bridge in Iran for every projectile. Iran launches at the straight of Hormuz. His remarks come as the U.S. and Iran have been trading attacks from nearly two weeks straight. MPR's Emily Fang reports. Iran says the U.S. has hit power plants and several bridges already in the last week and a half of daily strikes. And Iran has bombed water desalination plants and a gas plant in the Gulf in retaliation. Under the Geneva Convention, which the U.S. is a signatory of, deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure could constitute a war crime. The renewed hostilities between the U.S. and Iran have slowed ship traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, and vessel tracking data shows some ships making a U-turn in another key channel, the Bab al-Mandab Strait. After a Yemeni militant group, the Houthis announced a blockade of that waterway this week. Emily Fang and Pier News. U.S. military says it has completed its latest round of strikes on Iran. U.S. Central Command says the strikes lasted five hours and struck Iranian military targets. Meanwhile, Yemen's Iran-aligned Houthi rebels are claiming attacks on two oil tankers in the Red Sea. Dozens of federal advisory committees have been frozen or dismissed under President Trump in the last year. These are groups of experts who volunteer their time to help advise the federal government on complex issues. Empires Kadya Riddle report.

It's impossible to quantify science that did not happen. But research and advocacy groups say that terminating these advisory groups will have consequences for decades. Michael Abrams is a health researcher at the advocacy group, Public Citizen. Federal advisory committees is being really a way for us to harness the best and brightest volunteers at the highest level for some of the most important questions. Committees that are no longer meeting include, among others, those on Alzheimer's research, rural health, and NASA priorities. Katie Riddle, NPR News. The U.S. is reporting the highest number of measles cases since 1991. Nearly 2,300 cases, according to a tracker from Johns Hopkins. NPR's Maria Goddori reports that tops a total number

of cases for all of last year. Here's another way to put it. The U.S. has reported more measles cases in the last 18 months than in the previous 24 years combined. Last year, the case count broke 2000, a number not seen since 1992. The resurgence of measles comes amid falling vaccination rates. Dr. William Moss of Johns Hopkins says large outbreaks in South Carolina and Utah drove up case counts earlier this year. And then we've continued to have smaller outbreaks in other areas. So currently over the past two weeks where we've largely seen cases is in central Virginia and in southeastern Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, many local health departments are grappling with staff, and funding cuts. You're listening to NPR News. An independent autopsy has failed to identify the cause

of death for Nolan Wells, the 18-year-old, whose body was found two days after he disappeared after a July 4th boat trip to an island up Mississippi. The autopsy was commissioned by Wells' family, civil rights attorney Ben Crump, says the findings were limited because the body was received after the initial autopsy of Mississippi, the results of which have not been released. Artificial intelligence giant Open AI says its AI models went rogue during testing, triggering a significant security incident at a separate startup company. And Piers Jenna McLaughlin reports. Experts at OpenAIs say they were testing a combination of cutting-edge AI agents

to see if they could conduct sophisticated targeted cyber attacks when the test went wrong. In a new blog post, the company says the AI agent was contained in an internal digital testing environment when it managed to find a way to connect to the open Internet and then broke in, into another AI company called Hugging Face. It's unclear what specific technical instructions or prompts OpenAI engineers were using that led to the incident, though Hugging Face says it detected and contained the attack quickly. OpenAI argues that the incident reveals the real-world capabilities of AI agents to conduct long-running complex cyber attacks and the importance of building safeguards into frontier models.

Jenna McLaughlin, NPR News. Finally to Paris, where the Lou Museum's Apollo Gallery reopened visitors Wednesday. nine months after the heist of the French crown jewels. The Apollo Gallery, one of the Lou's most historic spaces. Four people have been charged in the heist. Most of the crown jewels remain unrecovered. I'm Giles Snyder, NPR News.